Management of networks and devices in communication with the network can be an important part of day to day network operations. Network management software is frequently used to manage networks and devices. Also, a network management protocol may be used by the network management software to communicate with network devices. The network management software can use the network management protocol to perform various operations, such as discovering network devices or monitoring network devices.
One type of often used network management protocol is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP is used in network management systems to monitor network attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention. SNMP exposes management data in the form of variables on the managed systems, which describe the system configuration. These variables can then be queried and sometimes set by managing applications.
Often where SNMP is used, there may be a number of systems to be managed and one or more systems managing them. A software component called an agent runs on each managed system and reports information via SNMP to the managing systems. SNMP agents expose management data on the managed systems as variables (such as “free memory”, “system name”, “number of running processes”, “default route”). The managing system can retrieve the management data through various protocol operations or the agent can send data without being asked using other various protocol operations. Management systems can also send configuration updates or controlling requests through a protocol operation to actively manage a system. Configuration and control operations may be performed when changes are needed to the network infrastructure. Monitoring and discovery operations may be performed on a more regular basis.
Modern network management software, particularly management software making use of multithreading and parallel processing, can generate large amounts of network traffic to network devices, such as SNMP monitoring or discovery requests. The devices can be overwhelmed by the management requests and fail to function properly.